


Someone Like Home

by 3ves



Category: Voltron: Legendary Defender
Genre: Homesickness, Hurt/Comfort, M/M, Oneshot, POV Lance (Voltron), Realizing Crushes
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-09-26
Updated: 2018-09-26
Packaged: 2019-07-17 17:23:07
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,865
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/16100285
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/3ves/pseuds/3ves
Summary: It’s here where Lance lets the quiet seep into him. Exploring space used to be everything he dreamed of and yearned for. It was a world to crawl towards, a place to reach for. He’s here now though and all he can really say is that it’s damn lonely.--As he stares out at an ocean on a distant planet, Lance misses his home.





	Someone Like Home

The beach is like home. The stars are different here though. It’s like looking into the mirror while in a dream and seeing your chin is askew and your eyes are set at the wrong angles. Lance can recognize this feeling though: the sand fitting into the spaces between his toes, the waves rushing up to his calves and chilling him to the bone, the heat of the Sun beating down on his back. Here, the cooler waters and brilliant moon are almost the same. It feels like home: everything he dreams of and yearns for. It feels like a dream.

It’s here where Lance lets the quiet seep into him. Exploring space used to be everything he dreamed of and yearned for. It was a world to crawl towards, a place to reach for. He’s here now though and all he can really say is that it’s damn lonely.

Shivers run up and down Lance’s spine when he recognizes the silhouette gracefully stepping down the sandy dunes towards him. Lean and sharp, Keith’s jawline stands out like a knife’s edge in the moonlight as he makes his way towards Lance. He stops at the shore a few feet behind Lance. When his violet eyes meet Lance’s, Lance feels pinned down like a butterfly spread on a blank canvas. This is his home and Keith is trespassing.

Despite the challenge in Keith’s eyes, Lance looks away first and ignores the prickle at the back of his neck from Keith’s gaze.

“Escaping from the party already, loner?” Lance jabs. Maybe if he annoys Keith enough, he’ll go and brood somewhere else. Keith blows an annoyed puff of air out as he rolls his eyes and crosses his arms.

“You left first. Why aren’t you back there with your fanclub?”

Lance looks out and out and out at the dots of light on the waves of a home that isn’t his. Truthfully, he likes it better here where he’s anchored by the ocean. It’s stupid but the ache that digs into him as he studies the choppiness of the waves and the color of the night sky feels good. It’s a reminder that he hasn’t lost himself out here. He’s still Lance, just a kid from Cuba looking for a little love and a place to call his own. Just a kid from Cuba who misses home.

“I had to get away from your stinky presence. Your frown was clouding up the atmosphere and making my aura turn an ugly color,” Lance says.

Keith surprises him by snorting. “Whatever you say. Are you just going to stay out there?”

Lance stares down at his toes and wriggles them a little in the sand. It’s coarser than the sand of his home. The edges of his rolled up jeans have started to become damp as the waves climb higher and higher. If he waits long enough, he could just slip away into the water. He imagines swimming far far away and breaking the surface to catch sight of his family waiting on distant shores.

“I’m waiting until I’m nice and pruney,” he calls over his shoulder and starts to walk into deeper waters. When he glances over his shoulder, Keith is wearing a strange look on his face. Part of Lance wants to go back and read the lines between Keith’s eyebrows, trace the tilt of his chin and the shape of his lips to figure out what he’s thinking. The other part of him is scared shitless by this and he turns to walk out further. His jeans are soaked at this point and the water is hiking up his shirt.

“Careful, Lance,” Keith yells, “The water’s getting pretty high.” As if he can’t tell for himself that the water is high.

“Chill out, Kogane. I’m fine!” 

Lance watches as the rising waves barrel towards him and a smile warps his face. These waves are nothing like home. The water rises and rises and Lance realizes he is so tired. How easy would it be to just pull the sea over him like a blanket that smells of salt and home?

“Lance.” There’s a warning note in Keith’s voice. Lance ignores it as the beginnings of an idea forms in his head.

As a second wave crashes down, Lance begins to call out, “Jeez, calm your tits, Keith. I’ll-”

He cuts himself out to dive under, taking a deep breath before falling. Beneath the ocean, the bright moon is a watery blur. Lance blows small bubbles out and watches them rise up to the surface and mix with the seafoam. He can stay under for a long time, he knows this about himself well. In his mind, he can picture Keith pacing nervously back on the beach, torn between diving in and waiting for him to come back up. Or maybe he’ll just leave. The blue paladin is gone? Good riddance.

The silence of the ocean is broken by splashes nearby. Warm arms cut into the water and pull him up spluttering.

Keith’s face is stunning this close. His eyes widen when Lance straightens out of the water with ease and pushes himself out of Keith’s arms. Of course he came to pull him out. Of course he didn’t care if he got his clothes wet. Out on the beach, Keith’s jacket has been discarded in a pile next to Lance’s jacket and shoes.

He can’t help it. Lance starts laughing.

“Oh my god! Keith! Your face! You actually came to stop me from drowning?”  
Keith’s face screws up in anger and he grabs Lance by the head and tries to shove him back under the waters, “I wouldn’t have gotten myself wet if you haven’t proven time and time again that you’re incapable of taking care of yourself!”

“Wait, wait, I might actually drown!” Lance gasps out between breaths, barely able to control his laughter. He reaches forward blindly and rests an arm on top of Keith’s shoulder to steady himself while simultaneously wrestling with Keith’s hand to keep him from shoving him back under.

Keith takes the opportunity to loop his arms beneath Lance’s shoulders and start dragging him out of the ocean. As he pulls, Lance can hear him muttering under his breath about how insufferable Lance is, about how stupid he can be sometimes, about how next time, he’ll just leave Lance to drown.

He drops Lance on the beach without much warning. The sand immediately clings to Lance’s clothes and he makes a mental note that his hair is probably going to need several washes to get all the sand and salt out. Still chuckling, Lance looks up at Keith and feels his humor fade away.

Above him, Keith is frowning, his face a mess of a serious gaze and a touch of concern. It’s weird to see him backlit by the moon like this, his tangled hair even worse due to his swim out to save Lance. 

Lance sits up and pats the sand beside him and, with another eye roll, Keith settles beside him. As they stare out at the ocean, Lance takes the moment to focus on the sound of the party on top of the hill and the sound of Keith’s breathing only a few inches away.

“Am I still clouding up your aura?” Keith asks, “Because you’re definitely clouding up mine.”

“Keith, you are the king of clouding up auras. There is no competition between us. I am only a humble aura cleanser, a bringer of light and joy.”

Keith glares at him. “I’d beg to differ.”

He’s beautiful in the moonlight. Bolder in conversations in a way that matches how he fights. In the day, when they’re with the others, Keith sulks in the background, ignores Lance’s jabs, and works to beat him at every single thing. There isn’t playful banter. There isn’t even more than a one-sided rivalry. Keith’s never spared Lance this much attention before and Lance doesn’t know what to do with it.

“I grew up on a beach,” he says and then he wonders why Keith would care.

After a beat of silence, Keith responds, “I never saw any of the oceans on Earth.”

“Wait, seriously!?”

“Lance, you saw where I grew up: a shack in the middle of the desert.”

Lance runs his hands through the sand nervously, pooling it in the palm of his hand before letting it run back out. Beside him, Keith takes off his shoes and peels off his socks.

“Do you ever miss your home?” It’s a quiet question, one Lance is afraid might reveal too much about him. When he looks at Keith, he sees someone he has always been chasing. He wonders if, in this too, Keith has him beat.

It doesn’t feel like a loss when Keith speaks though. Instead, Lance hears the tremor of insecurity in Keith’s voice, the hesitation to admit something terrible.

“No.” And then, “I’ve... never felt more at home than I do here.”

What he means by ‘here’, Lance can’t tell. Maybe ‘here’ is space. Maybe ‘here’ is with Voltron, with people who care. Maybe ‘here’ is here, by Lance on this lonely beach that feels like home but isn’t quite it next to a boy that feels both familiar and strange.

In the admission, Lance reads Keith’s shame and he wonders if Earth was unkind to Keith in all the ways the stars have been to Lance.

A moment later, Keith asks, “Do you?”

His voice is unsure in all the ways Keith never is and Lance isn’t sure if he likes the way uncertainty looks on Keith Kogane. 

Lance pulls his legs up to his chest and curls inwards. “All the time.”

“...I’m sorry.”

It’s the wrong thing to say. No part of it reaches Lance as he stares out at this unfamiliar beach that brings more pain than comfort. He misses his mom, the way she always hugged just tight enough for him to feel loved. He misses his niece and nephew, the way Isa was so smart and flighty, how her mind leaped from idea to idea like birds in the treetops, the way Manuel would barrel into him whenever they met in the hopes of toppling Lance. He misses his siblings and their teasing jokes, how he was always one of the Sanchez kids stirring up trouble at school. 

Keith’s words aren’t enough to heal anything but, sitting next to Keith, Lance suspects that Keith knows this as he uneasily shifts closer. Shivering in the cold, Lance finds some semblance of comfort in Keith’s focus on the waters ahead of him, in the way Keith is trying to be here even though Lance never asked him to be.

When Lance looks toward Keith and sees that same sharp jawline and tangled mullet, something twists in his gut and Lance knows this feeling from all those years of letting girls break his heart on the shores of Varadero. He feels his homesickness ease in the face of something familiar but strange and suddenly he’s not on a beach that resembles the home that he misses more with every passing day. He’s just with Keith.

**Author's Note:**

> I've been meaning to write something for Keith and Lance for a while now. This fic is kind of a self-indulgent fic tbh. I wish the writers had spent more time on Lance's homesickness instead of just hinting at it and I also think that Keith actually wouldn't be good at comforting people.  
> Hopefully I can find the time to write a Keithcentric fic because Keith is actually lowkey my fave (behind Matt because who doesn't love Matt.)  
> Thank you for reading and I hope you enjoyed this!


End file.
